In recent years increased effort has been done towards taking advantage of computation resources in a number of units that are connected in a network in order to increase the total computation capacity. Using the resources of many separate computers connected by a network, such as the Internet, to solve computation problems of large scale is often referred to as grid-computing.
Agile computing also refers to sharing of resources, however agile computing is directed towards a more dynamic and volatile environment with dynamically shifting resources and requirements compared to grid computing. Where grid computing is intended for large computational resources connected e.g. via a static network, agile computing is in particular targeted for use in a much more mobile environment with limited resources e.g. in the form of intermittent connections between units, limited power resources, low bandwidth connections, etc.
The article “Agile Computing: Bridging the Gap between Grid Computing and Ad-hoc Peer-to-Peer Resource Sharing” by Suri, Niranjan et. al., Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID'03) discloses a system of hosts that are arranged in groups and adapted for agile computing.
Nodes in an agile computing environment group are often mobile units, which leads to the risk of breaking the connection between the nodes in the group.